


What the Darkness Does

by Neelh



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Autistic Character, Ford Is Neurodivergent AF, Gen, I mean, Reverse Portal AU, and um otherwise his brain is just a mess i guess, i've ruined my sleep cycle i don't even care anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-13 00:13:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7130387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neelh/pseuds/Neelh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Dipper, Mabel, thank you,” he smiles, kneeling down beside them both and hugging them as close as he can to his chest, feeling the soft wool and the weighted jacket and reminding himself that they exist, they are safe, and he is alive.</p><p>“Geez, thanks,” Stanley’s familiar, if still surprising, voice says from above him.“I’m so glad that everyone who came to rescue your sorry butt is appreciated.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	What the Darkness Does

**Author's Note:**

> cw: depiction of a meltdown and references to alcohol abuse
> 
> au belongs to busket

Stanford runs a hand through his greying hair, despite the static shock that reaches to his fingers and tingles rather uncomfortably.

“Dipper, Mabel, thank you,” he smiles, kneeling down beside them both and hugging them as close as he can to his chest, feeling the soft wool and the weighted jacket and reminding himself that they exist, they are safe, and he is alive.

“Geez, thanks,” Stanley’s familiar, if still surprising, voice says from above him. His expression tells Ford that if he still had both of his arms, they would be folded across his chest. “I’m so glad that everyone who came to rescue your sorry butt is appreciated.”

Ford drops his arms from around the twins in order to clutch his knees as he stands. He brushes imaginary dust from his coat and blinks at his brother in the most unimpressed way he can muster. “Thank you,” he repeats, though with as an aloof a tone as he could muster, before looking around to try to find anyone he recognises. Ah, there’s Fiddleford, he needs to apologise so much for everything-

Stanley doesn’t let him leave. “So, you have a way to beat Bill?” he asks loudly, even though Ford can hear him perfectly at a normal speaking volume.

Immediately, all eyes are on Ford. “Uh, well, yes. It’s… Does anyone have a pen? Pencil? Anything?”

One of the teens, a black-haired boy that Dipper was feuding with a month or so ago, Robin or something, holds up a can of spray paint. “Is this good?” he asks.

“Perfect!” Ford replies, smiling and taking the can. He shakes it and begins to spray it onto the floor, revealing it to be a lovely bright blue.

“Great,” Stanley says as Ford nudges him out of the way to continue painting down the circle that he had seen so many years ago that still made the odd appearance in his nightmares. “He’s drawing a circle. Whatever Bill did to him made him go nuts. I’m out of here.”

“I’m not nuts!” replies Ford, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Just let me… Ah, there it is! This is how we can defeat Bill!”

The Northwest girl, the llama, raises an eyebrow. “By using the world’s most confusing game of hopscotch?”

How would that work? Ford’s mind races with the possibilities, how the symbols and the people it represents could be incorporated, but he shakes his head. “No, it’s a prophecy, although it would make a pretty fun game of hopscotch.”

He describes how in the cave where he first summoned Bill, the circle was drawn there, saying that the combined power of the people represented on the circle could defeat Bill once and for all.

“And how’s that meant to work?” asks the teenager who is probably called Robin.

“I have no idea, so we’re all going to hold hands and hope for the best,” Ford says. “Now, the symbols. Dipper, the Pine Tree. Mabel, the Shooting Star. Soos, you’re the question mark.”

“But who’s the ice?” Dipper asks. “Does anyone here have an ice pack or something?”

“The symbols don’t have to be literal, Dipper,” Ford says, moving onto his own symbol. “Ice could be someone cool in the face of danger, like how the Glasses could be someone scholarly. Wendy, Fiddleford, if you could?”

“Grunkle Stan!” Mabel shouts, and Stanford looks around to see Stanley standing next to the triangular hole in the wall that appeared at some point between Ford being turned to gold again and being turned back into a human. For a moment, all he can see is his brother falling backwards, and his six-fingered hands having pushed him with more strength than he needed to in order to protect that journal, protect his research, protect all he was good for and then failing Stanley.

But then that moment is over, and Mabel is tugging on Stan’s sleeve. “Grunkle Stan, you’re on the circle too! The weird thingy on the back of your jacket!”

“What weird thingy on the back of my jacket?” Stan grins.

“If you washed your clothes once in a while, you’d see it!” she says, and Stanley lifts her up with his sole arm.

He laughs. “I was just messing with ya, kiddo.”

He carries her back to her symbol on the wheel between the little dancing kid who used the amulet and the Northwest kid, and scans for what is now the only free space, with Soos on his right and Ford on his left. He makes eye contact, and Ford shudders at how cold Stanley’s gaze can instantly turn. Stanley walks over and takes Soos’s hand, becoming covered in the blue glow that began to shine over everyone in the circle as they joined hands.

“Everyone get out,” Ford says loudly to the other people from Bill’s huge throne of human agony. “This could get dangerous!”

They don’t need telling twice, as Bill passes by, hitting the Mystery Shack with its own leg. When the room is cleared except for the circle, Ford goes to take his brother’s hand-

And it’s not there.

How could he have been so _stupid_?

As soon as he thinks that, he tries to turn it on Stanley. It’s his fault; it has to be. Stanley ruins everything. Stanley ruins everything, because if he doesn’t, then Ford doesn’t want to think about that.

“If you accepted the prosthetic, we could actually do this,” Ford says, because this is the one time when his filter for his goddamn rationalisations fails and he could actually punch himself. He _wants_ to punch himself. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, he can’t, because Stanley punches him first.

“Are you kidding?” Stanley shouts. “You just wanted me to take it so that you could ignore the fact that you left me, you jerkoff, and so you could forget that it was _your fault_!”

“So I could ignore it? I wanted to help you!” Ford yells back, trying to hit Stanley but not wanting to hurt him.

He needs to get away, but he can’t because there’s still work to be done. Someone yells to just hold the stump, but Ford can’t process it. He hears the words, but all he knows is to get away from Stanley, to hit Stanley back, to feel fists hitting chests and palms slapping faces, to hear every sound of the apocalypse from Stanley’s yelled insults to the Shacktron breaking down and then that voice speaks and it’s Bill and he’s failed.

 

-

 

“Don’t blame yourself,” Ford says, and it comes so easily because he’s told himself that so many times. “Blame me. It’s my fault. I summoned him and now he’s going to kill the twins.”

Ford pats down his coat for the water canteen that he had filled with vodka during his last visit to the basement when Weirdmageddon started. He unscrews the lid and chugs about half of the contents before handing it to Stanley as they both slouch onto the floor, leaning against the side of their pyramid prison.

Stanley takes a few swigs before smirking at Ford. “You been doing this around the kids?”

“No!” Ford replies, before glancing away. In a softer voice, he adds, “Not often. ‘S not easy to deal with knowing that you left your brother for dead because if you get him back, you could destroy the universe.”

“You did it anyway,” Stanley shrugs. “You got me back.”

Ford stands up again and walks to the other side of the prism cage. “And look at where we are now! It’s entirely my fault for pushing you into the portal, for building it in the first place, for fucking _abandoning_ you!”

He reaches into his inner coat pocket, trying to grab his canteen and feel the odd-tasting burn on his tongue and down his throat, but instead his hand rests on a metal handle of a gun. He pulls it out, and stares.

“Stanley,” he says. “Stanley, I have a plan.”

“Wait, isn’t that the memory gun?” asks Stanley, staring at the bulb that made up the barrel of the gun. He takes another swig from Ford’s canteen, but then splutters suddenly. “What are you _thinking_? Are you crazy?”

“No, Stanley! For once, I’m not!” Stanford beams. “Bill wants the equation in my head, but if you erase my memory before that, then you’ll erase him and th-this, this could all be done with!”

“I’m going to confiscate this,” Stan says, lifting the canteen. “You’ve clearly been drinking too much to realise that this is an awful idea.”

As Stanley goes to put the canteen in his pocket, Ford stills his hand and takes out the canteen, slipping it back into its pocket, and replacing it with the memory gun. “It’s not. It’s the only way. We need to protect the kids, Stanley,” says Ford.

“I know,” Stanley says.

There’s a moment, where the twins face each other with half-averted gazes. The air is still and thick with unspoken words. Words like “Please, find another way.” Words like “Don’t go, I don’t want to be alone again.” Words like “I love you.”

Eventually, Stan sticks his arm out. He is rigid, like a primitive robot, but his brows are furrowed enough that his wrinkles seem deeper than ever. “I need you to…”

“Of course,” Ford says, taking the memory gun. His hand hovers over the dial, quivering, and for a moment he feels like a criminal from a century ago being forced to tie his own noose. But if Stanford is good for anything, it will have to be this.

He enters _Stanford Pines_.

“As soon as Bill goes into my mind, I’m going to need you to do it,” says Ford, pressing the gun back into Stanley’s hand. “Don’t forget to hide it so he doesn’t catch on before we make the deal.”

“I know, it’s not like you need to tell me everything like Mom,” mutters Stanley, placing it into his own jacket’s inner pocket. He looks at Ford with desperate eyes.

If Stanford told him not to do it, that it’s a bad idea, then Stanley wouldn’t do it. If Stanford said that he can’t die, because that’s what this is. This thing, erasing his entire sense of self? It’s dying. It’s dying and Stanford can’t lie to himself, but he can replace his emotionless mask - the one he used whenever Dipper and Mabel played and laughed together and he couldn’t stop thinking of Stanley, when Ma died and Ford hadn’t spoken to her since he pushed Stanley through the portal, when he left the house and people saw him and he couldn’t show any fear or they would know and they would hurt him – he can replace that mask and martyr himself for the world. He can do something good for once in his failure of a lifetime.

 

-

 

“It’s in here,” Stanford says, holding out a numberless journal to Bill in the library that made up his mindscape. “Everything I know about Gravity Falls is in here.”

Bill’s pupil contracts in ecstasy as he takes the journal from Ford’s hand. “Finally” At last, I can-“

It bursts into blue flames.

“Woah, hey!” Bill says, fumbling with it as if the heat could hurt him. “Wh-what’s happening?”

“It’s gone,” says Ford, his eyes closed. It’s true; he can’t remember anything about Gravity Falls except a prison filled with triangles and the two children who feel like warmth and joy when he thinks about them. He opens them; sees his mind burning around him; and he grins at Bill with the mouth of a wolf. “It’s all gone, Bill.”

“ _What_?” Bill’s voice is loud, screeching, and permeating. “I’ll get out! You know I will!”

“No you won’t,” Stanford laughs.

Ford leaps at Bill and begins to rip the demon apart brick by brick, like tearing ruined pages from a notebook. Every moment is savoured, no matter how soon they will be forgotten. And he is forgetting so many things; where he lived as a child, his best friend’s surname, his senses of taste and smell. But he knows that this was something he had wished for for a long time, and that this amount of satisfaction was exactly what he expected.

And then there’s nothing left but a few specks of yellow, sparking like glitter and dissolving like sugar in coffee, and even those bits soon fade out into the blue flames that now make up his mindscape. The word soon slips out of his mind, and the blank space it left is soon burnt away.

Where is he?

Who is he?

He curls up in the blue flames and sobs, even then forgetting the sound of his own voice.

**Author's Note:**

> let me rest. heaven blessed. bring me home. bring me home. bring me home


End file.
